Hare has said he set out to write a history play, in the manner of Shakespeare repurposing Holinshed’s Chronicles. The playwright interviewed politicians, diplomats, military leaders, UN officials, and journalists to come up with a compelling meditation, part public record, part guesswork, on the uses and abuses of power — also a favorite theme of Shakespeare. But Hare puts on stage not a batch of enumerated Henrys but George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, British prime minister Tony Blair, and flawed, ultimately buckling tragic hero Colin Powell. And in the two years since its debut at London’s National Theatre, his compelling compilation of fact and intelligent speculation has accumulated corroboration and a cruel irony.

Even in a small-scale production, this parading of transcripts and peeps behind closed doors is a major undertaking, backed here by a running slide show at either end of the runway-like playing space that stands in for the White House, 10 Downing Street, Camp David, the UN, and even the ranch in Crawford (“a crossroad in a scorpion-infested wilderness”). The performances are variously effective, with Harold Withee intermittently honing in on Bush’s smirk, squint, and smugness and Steven M. Key painting an eloquent portrait of the troubled Powell. If the entire ensemble isn’t up to Key’s standard, the players still get the job done.

More spiritual than political is Iraqi-American journalist and performer Heather Raffo’s look toward war-torn Iraq, 9 Parts of Desire, which is in its area premiere at Lyric Stage Company of Boston (through November 18). The piece takes its name from a seventh-century imam’s allegation that God created sexual desire in 10 parts, nine of which he gave to women. But the one-woman play also fields nine characters who share a “very big heart” characterized by sexual hunger, fierce family feeling, and a connection to something so old our relatively young culture probably cannot fathom it. The author continues to perform the work herself, but at the Lyric, under the fluid direction of Carmel O’Reilly, her characters are interwoven by Lanna Joffrey, twisting the traditional abaya, along with other bits and pieces of costume, over black harem sweats and tank top. The actress, looking more Iraqi than the blonde Raffo, captures the play’s lyrical rhythms and imbues each character, from an irrepressible Bedouin unlucky in love to a full-length-black-clad mother serving as a human monument to a family lost, with a distinct personality.

Raffo’s women are survivors — of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, of American bombings, of a culture embargoed into greater fundamentalism, of men dehumanized by war. Among them: a professional mourner feeding the “worn soles” of shoes to a rapacious river; a bohemian artist (inspired by Layla Attar’s painting “Savagery”) who is also a Saddam collaborator; a Scotch-swilling septuagenarian intellectual living in London; a doctor coping with the deadly effects of depleted uranium from the Gulf War; an Iraqi teen who when not listening to ’N Sync can distinguish the sound of one American gun from another; a heartbroken stoic who lost her entire family in the 1991 bombing of the Amiriya bomb shelter; a scampering street peddler of art and antiquities; and a clearly autobiographical Iraqi-American New Yorker glued to CNN as half of her heritage goes up in flames.

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